Help:Upgrading old-style person articles
We still have thousands of person-articles that were created using outdated, mostly manual, systems and templates. (See Familypedia:Reports.) Upgrading them will add value to them and to the wiki as a whole because their data will be more easily listed elsewhere.Contributors are strongly urged to upgrade these articles (as described hereunder) so as to reduce the need for retyping and to improve linkages and allow automatic displays of tables such as children, siblings, and ancestors. Bringing old-style articles into the forms system #If the pagename includes a question-mark, rename it to delete that. If it has "(?-?)", change that to "(-)" or try to find an exact or reasonably-estimated birth or death year. Check the "leave a redirect" and "subpages" boxes. #'Copy the (corrected) pagename to your clipboard'. #'Open a new window or tab in Familypedia, move your pointer to the top menu item "Create or edit article" (or similar wording) and move down to click on Form:Person'. #'Paste the name into the box and click the "Create ..." button.' #You reach a "form" page with lots of buttons, links, and input boxes. (There should be a warning saying the page exists but doesn't use the form: right! No worries; everything that was on the page is still there, partly visible in an expandable edit box near the bottom. Best not to touch any parts of that that you don't understand. Probably safe to delete empty sections that are unlikely to be filled and any that will be redundant, such as "Parents", but safer to leave it alone until a future edit.) #'Fill in the first name, surname, and short name' (copying from your original article where convenient). Those three are compulsory. It can be best to do the short name first, starting by pasting the full page name in, and you may be able to highlight and drag copies of its various names up to their specific boxes so as to save typing time. #'Fill in the gender and anything else you like (copying wherever possible), preferably including spouse(s) and at least one child'. In the parent and spouse fields, it may wise to paste instead of typing, because if you type just a letter or two you may get "autosuggest" temporarily locking your computer as its "script" tries to offer you a list of thousands of articles. Where you are naming people (e.g. parent(s), partner(s), and child(ren)), please include dates in parentheses just as on a standard page name, and use plus signs (with optional spaces but nothing else) to join people sharing a field, such as spouses, children, and contributors. #Now could be a good time to click "Publish", but you may instead continue with more data entry. #Include your user name in the Contributors box; typing a few letters of it will probably give you an "autosuggest" for quick finish. Ideally check the page history so as to include other editors in order of their contributions. #'In the "free text" area at the bottom, you generally need to add a couple of templates': ## near the bottom ## (unless sure there were none) further up. Replace any existing "Siblings" heading with the template, which creates its own heading even if no siblings appear automatically. If the mother's page will be the first or only parent page to be created or upgraded, or you need her children by another partner, you need to add the mother's name after a pipe, e.g. . Please add a brief edit summary (e.g. "intro" or "upgrade") - otherwise the "Recent changes" item may take up three lines and delay users who are checking the changes. Normally you need not bother with "Preview"; it's not an accurate guide to page appearance for person-pages. Just click "Publish" (unless there is a chance that someone else has edited the page since you started). Actions for a later edit After the first edit, much of what you can do can be done with an ordinary "Edit", not "Edit with form". In fact, editing with the form can move some things around annoyingly because it generally allows only one "free text" area on any page, with templates above and below. To edit an infobox without upsetting anything else, click the "edit facts" link at bottom right. Don't add or delete any pair of curly brackets unless sure what that will do, and never delete a single curly or square bracket or pipe unless 100% sure what you are doing. If there's a category like "Non-SMW person articles", you can delete that. There should now be a category relating to "facts articles". If there's a "married same sex" category, there's a gender field to fix; easy to miss first time. If (as there should be at first) there's a category about "globals missing", you should create a sensor page, which takes just a few clicks and lets you create tree and descendants subpages with two or three more clicks each and with a few more clicks (e.g. "Edit" and "Publish" on sensor page and article) get tabs for them on each of them and the article. Occasionally, if no "tree" or "descendants" tabs show up when they should, you must also add, in the top template, the following additional line: |globals= You can delete redundant sections (usually parents, spouse(s), and children) and a surname category or template (because the software has used the "surname" field to link to that automatically). Other facts such as birth, baptism, marriage, death, and burial details are usually added most easily with the form (usually with copy-and-paste from the old version in another window) but can be added manually (in the template section near the top) using the "parameter" lines shown on Forum:Data entry without using Form:Person. Existing details that already have parameter lines can be altered manually. If there are children and more than one spouse, you may need some fiddling, possibly changing a "group" number if the only children are by the second spouse, for example. Ask another active editor for help if it looks too difficult. Finally, augment the text sections as much as you like. Add photos where possible; if they come from WikiMedia Commons, you don't need to upload them. You may move the whole of a template - particularly - up or down. . Using "Edit facts" for the infobox uses "FormEdit" without rearranging other parts. How to concentrate on "your" pages Thurstan produced this very easy listing-device. Paste it into your "todo" page or "user" page or similar, and change the "Elrondlair" to your user name. Pages I started that need upgrading category=Non-SMW people articles createdby=Elrondlair See also * Person *